When doctor Bill Frankland moved from his London house off Harley Street last year to a care home near Barbican, he quickly identified the nicest of its 11 rooms. It overlooks gardens near Charterhouse Square, and has several windows and a fireplace. Birthday cards now fill the mantlepiece, including several from The Queen.

“I waited because most of the other rooms are smaller,” says Frankland, who has just turned 107. He wears a tweed jacket over a navy cardigan and sits in his armchair. A table next to it is loaded with chocolates and shortbread. “There was a man in here, and I wished him no ill – in fact, he was a Lord – but when he died, I thought: ‘Good!’”

Frankland has earned the right to joke about death, to which he has come close, he says, eight times. He was born in March 1912, a month before the Titanic went down, and has lost more people than he might care to count. His twin brother, John, lived to the age of 83.

Yet the doctor, who qualified a decade before the birth of the NHS, and was forced to treat his Japanese captors as a prisoner of war in Singapore, has not fully retired. He clutches a draft of his latest paper – a biography of a forgotten pioneering heart surgeon. “Between the ages of 100 and 105, I produced four academic papers, two entirely by myself,” he adds.

(Photo: Dave Guttridge/The Photo Unit)

A fascinating life

Frankland is an allergist, and a pioneer himself. After spending the war years in the Royal Army Medical Corps, during which he witnessed – and survived – a level of suffering he would be unable to talk about for decades, he began his specialism at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, west London, where the allergy clinic is now named after him.

He became an expert in asthma and hayfever, and worked with Sir Alexander Fleming, who had won the Nobel Prize for discovering penicillin.

Frankland was ahead of his time in believing that increasing hygiene causes more allergies because immune systems are less stimulated. He also studied desensitisation, or the exposure of patients to small amounts of the substance to which they are allergic.

He nearly died again in 1955 when he let a blood-sucking tropical insect bite him every day as part of an experiment. Eventually, he went into severe anaphylactic shock. “I developed what we call a fear of impending doom,” Frankland recalls, almost 70 years later. A shot of adrenaline did the trick.

Treating a dictator

As his reputation grew, Frankland began to travel widely. He talks now in a series of extended anecdotes but occasionally drops in a startling line, almost as if to test the visitor’s attention.

“Of course, my most grateful patient was Saddam Hussein,” he says after a long story about moving from St Mary’s, where he retired aged 65, to Guy’s Hospital, where he worked for another 20 years. The Iraqi dictator summoned Frankland to Baghdad in 1979, the year he took power, to advise him on his asthma.

“I said he hasn’t got asthma, but I noticed that if he wasn’t eating or sleeping, he was smoking,” the doctor says. “He smoked 40 a day and one of the silliest things I ever said was: ‘If you’re still smoking in two years’ time, you will not be head of state.’” Frankland returned to Iraq weeks later to find Hussein had quit and recovered.

(Photo: Dave Guttridge/The Photo Unit)

Aches and pains

The doctor’s own health is, as he says, “pretty good for 107”. He says he recently grew out of a 90-year bout of seasonal hay fever. He suffers severe leg pain and sometimes has to sleep in his chair. When his legs are lowered, the pain stops. Random pains affect other parts of his body, and his spine has begun to fail. He can still make it to the home’s dining room, to weekly singing sessions and to his book club, but excursions have become difficult, and he says he is lonely at times.

Yet Frankland’s brain and eyes remain bright, and he is positive about the world.

It is more the little things that annoy him now: the tiny type the British Medical Journal uses to address its envelopes, which Frankland blames for their frequent late arrival; the interruption during our interview by a nurse bearing a replacement jug of water; the ineptitude of a minibus driver who caused him a head injury on a doomed recent outing to Alexandra Palace.

How Frankland spends his life now

A television stands across from Frankland’s armchair, under a portrait of his late wife, Pauline, whom he married in 1941. He watches the news and the odd war documentary. “But Pointless is my favourite – I’m hooked on it,” he says. Last summer, Frankland enjoyed sitting in the garden watching jays bathe in the little fountain.

He reads a lot, including several academic journals, and is fascinated by developments in the study of allergies. The journals are stacked next to him, along with a copy of his recent biography, From Hell Island To Hay Fever: The Life of Dr Bill Frankland.

There’s also an old copy of the first Just William book, which he is reading for his book group. “I think I was about nine when I last read it,” he says. It’s possible: it was published in 1922, the year Frankland turned 10.

The doctor has a big family, including 10 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren (“and a fourth who is 12 weeks in utero”).

He appreciates the attention longevity has brought him after decades of professional distinction, although puts it down only to luck and, well, not dying. In the twilight of an 80-year career, he has no plans to stop. “At present, I don’t want to die,” he says, smiling. “Would you like a chocolate?”

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